Santa Fe (Or, Whales)

Mish wakes up screaming the night it happens. The screaming is before and undoubtedly why Candace won’t believe what happens next. The screaming is the first few seconds of a nightmare that Mish refuses to have, a practiced scream to wake herself up. And she does. And she goes to the window and checks the newly installed bars, and she grips the metal with her hands and shakes to make sure they aren’t falling off, and she presses her forehead to the cold wall and lets the breeze dry her damp skin. And she remembers when the bars weren’t there and anyone could get in but more importantly, when she could jump out.

As she calms herself, she hears footsteps up the stairs and down the hallway. Candace walks in while Mish changes her wet, sweaty shirt. “Another one?” Candace asks. She reaches to hold her like a mother would, and for that reason exclusively Mish takes two steps back.

“I shouldn’t drink before bed,” Mish says. 

It’s 2:27am when Mish walks downstairs and into the kitchen, passing Candace’s studio where she’s working on scoring another Honda commercial. The floor to ceiling windows of the living room streak the house in blackness and moonlight.

Mish realizes Candace has followed her. Candace’s hair hangs perfectly in waves down her back and Mish is suddenly aware of her own oily, unwashed bangs, sticking upward and misaligned from an entire summer of at-home haircuts. 

Mish sets up the kettle for a French press and grabs a pickle out of the fridge, sticking her fingers directly into the jar. 

“How’s the song?” she asks. 

“Fine. It’s going.” 

Mish feels herself being watched and grabs another pickle, eating it up and down its side like a beaver. There was a time Mish would have preferred Candace not know she ate food, let alone with her fingers and let alone at 2:29 in the morning. There was a time they didn’t live with bars on the windows.

“You going to be okay?” Candace asks. “I’m almost done.” 

“I’m fine.” 

In a flash of self-consciousness, Mish feels like she should apologize but isn’t sure for what.  It was an experiment, moving here for the summer together, to a vacation home in the mountains once filled with fancy friends, Audis and Teslas parked in the drive, a $10,000 Cartier watch waved about as someone told a story about linens and lemons.  

Mish’s dad would make fun of places like this, the ones owned by childless adults who couldn’t possibly fill all the empty rooms. Candace’s house, bought in cash and won in a divorce, has 8 rooms and only one bed. The rest are comically vacant. If he could remember Mish, he would get a good laugh. That’s the problem with the endless dropkick of dementia – you can’t even delight in hating the things you hate. 

Candace finally leaves and Mish stands, watching the kettle. In the empty room she catches her breath.  

There was a time they might have stayed up together, drinking the last of Candace’s bourbon on the floor by the couch. Now she’s afraid to miss the times that might not come again, she’s afraid to feel anything more than lifeless apathy. Feeling anything might make their slow separation even more painful. She feels guilty about screaming. 

The whistling. She pours the boiling water into the French press and watches the grounds swirl. 

Now one more round of waiting. Before you’re in love, falling feels like it might be a jump-scare, a thing that hits all at once, overwhelms you with compulsion. Once you’re in love, falling out of it feels like a marathon of waiting, waiting for the coffee and waiting for Candace to finish work, waiting for yourself to feel okay enough to say goodbye – but not so okay that you forget you once loved them the way you did. Waiting, simply, to feel less.  

Out of habit, she taps the security monitor on the smart fridge, the one that tells you when you’re running out of barley milk. Mish clicks through each camera angle – every side of the house, the driveway, the lake, the shed, the back porch. The lake. 

The lake?  

She taps back. 

There is no lake. 

Her fingers hover away from the screen. She blinks, trying to re-wet her contacts. 

It’s a lake. She’s not sure the difference between a lake or a pond out here, in the mountains by Breckenridge, among the twisting roads by gated mansions that they’re allowed to call “cabins.” But Candace’s home has never had a lake on its property and this camera angle named “LAKE” has never been here before.

She leans closer, the pixels of the screen in 1080p definition flickering shades of gray-green-black night vision. It’s definitely water, real water, little frothy white icecap waves rising up and down. 

With two fingers, she spreads the screen and tries to zoom in – there is no zoom feature. She feels like those babies who grow up with iPads and assume every window is a touchscreen tablet.

Mish checks the clock. 2:43. 

She takes the keys from the counter and grabs Candace’s ex-husband’s Patagonia fleece from the coatrack. Then as quietly as possible, she opens and shuts the front door behind her, walking barefoot off the porch and down the long drive to the gate.

*

From the studio, Candace watches Mish leave the house on the security monitor. She reaches over and touches the screen, navigating to the menu that controls the lights around the property, and turns on giant lamps that illuminate the dark walkway. 

She doesn’t really have work to finish tonight, the deadline isn’t until next week, and the piece is all but finished. She comes into the studio most nights with a glass of bourbon and reads, goes through old boxes on shelves filled with false memories, shit she wouldn’t remember if she wasn’t trying to fill time. Old scorecards from Scrabble games with Paul, pens from his dental practice. His Rubber Soul vinyl with a note attached she wrote twenty years ago, right out of college.

She’s considering selling the place with everything still tucked inside it. Maybe they’ll do a blind auction and someone will find the artifacts of a life she can’t believe she once lived. Maybe they’ll buy it with Mish still inside, walking in circles in the bedroom, spinning out about how bizarre it feels that the house is empty. Two summers ago, Candace sold all the beds, all the furniture in nurseries that were never needed, the ghostly reminders of children she and Paul lost over the years and never brought here for a family summer vacation. Losing a child you never met, it’s something she can’t explain to Mish, all young with limbs and impulses and unrelenting declarations.

There’s a cruelty to how she’s been pulling away, Candace knows. There’s a cruelty to how little she thought of Mish’s age until it finally felt like a burden. There’s a cruelty to how she wants Mish to dive into a curious loneliness every night. There’s a cruelty to her relief whenever Mish wakes from a nightmare, relief that Mish is feeling something besides nothing.

Candace first asked for Mish’s number after meeting at a mutual friend’s birthday party. The friend was Evelyn, Candace’s neighbor in Denver and Mish’s graduate school teacher who’d taken an interest in this 25 year old’s icy stare and aggressively unforgiving commentary during class discussions about Lee Krasner or Joan Mitchell. Their first date was in Santa Fe. Mish had never been and a few hours later, Candace picked her up and they drove south from Denver through the night. She remembers feeling impressed as she watched Mish slip over words and rework them into a personality that she thought might impress Candace. She remembers Mish’s tangled hair she still never combs, she remembers a septum ring that is no longer there.

They ate at a vegan restaurant where Candace ordered an $87 bottle, then went back to an adobe Airbnb where she lit a fire, turned on the air conditioning (it was July), and asked Mish about her mother. They talked each other to sleep in a wine-drunk haze of cold sweat. 

It’s bizarre to recall herself in that memory, the way she knew how little of herself she was giving, the way she knew she was coaxing Mish into filling the space. Candace remembers when she first felt Mish growing dependent on her, the way she never told Mish no, the way she forgot to tell her she doesn’t believe in forever. It feels cruel to have stopped loving someone who, at your persistence, grew large enough to swallow themselves (and you) whole – and then did, becoming entirely dependent on you living inside their throat because, months ago, you tolerated the misgivings of a young narcissist auditioning a new personality. 

In a wild sweep last winter, Mish’s mother put her father into a nursing home without consulting the family, Mish was expelled from the university for vandalism, and Mish stopped taking Zoloft. And here Candace gave herself, and enabled them both to stop existing, and co-created a black hole of need and safe-keeping. 

Months past. The nightmares started. Mish turned a one glass into two glasses into half a bottle before bed. She broke a vase in a hotel room they stayed at in Asheville. She threatened to kill herself. She threatened to throw herself out windows. Candace wanted to laugh, seeing the hyperbolic self-destruction laying itself at her doorstep.

So for a few hours a night, Candace removes herself silently, cruelly, waiting for Mish to consider a version of herself alone. The kind martyr, the condescending mother, the whatever – she’s afraid of the person Mish might become if she leaves now, and afraid of the person Mish might become if she never does.

*

On the edge of the lake, Mish hasn’t blinked for seventeen minutes. She sits, barefoot, watching the surface of the water break itself open again and again by the curved back and the tail of what is, with absolute certainty, a humpback whale. 

It dances underneath, its silhouette a massive and frightening thing, pushing waves out to the shoreline that race forward, touch her toes, run back again. 

She thinks of calling Candace to come watch with her. She thinks of jumping on the whale’s back. She thinks of counting the dots in the sky or the rocks on the shore but instead she sits, unblinking, lips parted, watching this whale dance in circles.

In Candace’s ex’s jacket she feels 13 again, wearing a grown man’s coat. At 13, she was still a child but her body was changing and she hated it, lingering in a phase where she wore only boy’s shirts and boy’s pants. You are so angry when you are 13. You are realizing how time owns your body in a way not even God understands. Time sharpens your mind and dulls your spirit. Time is endless. 

But unlike time (or God), the whale in the water doesn’t feel like a truth she needs to bargain with. For the first time all summer, she allows herself to be swallowed by the moment. It is her nature to deny, her instinct to ridicule – but here at a lake that might not really exist, she is overcome with a sensation at her feet. Curiosity. Fullness. 

She knows Candace has been affected by her depression all summer, she’s not sure what to do with the knowing. Be not depressed? She knows Candace is walking on eggshells, avoiding eye contact like they’re new roommates and not partners of a full year.

She stands, assuming the coffee is ready, and walks back. The motion sensor lights are still on. Just as she steps into the front door she is struck with an uncontainable feeling of sadness, realizing she already knows Candace won’t believe her.

*

Around 4, Mish is asleep on the floor of the living room when Candace comes out of her studio. The un-plunged French press is full on the counter. The wine glass in her hand has spilled onto the hardwood and a tiny streak of red drips down her jacket sleeve.

“Hey,” Candace touches her head. “Want to move to the bed?” 

“Hi.” Mish rolls over. “I want to stay here.” 

“Alright.” 

Candace turns to leave and Mish grabs her ankle. 

“Will you stay?” 

“Okay.” Candace grabs a blanket and lays down. Both are too tired to hold each other.

“I saw a whale,” Mish whispers.

“In your dream?”

“At the lake.” 

Candace strokes her hair like a schoolteacher would, and for that reason Mish lets herself fall back asleep. 

*

Mish started microdosing when her dad was diagnosed, when her mom wouldn’t answer her calls. She tried seventeen different kinds of probiotics and antacids to get her twisting stomach under control. Years before, a family physician put her on an antidepressant and a court-ordered therapist put her on an anti-anxiety. When they first arrived and this giant house felt like a horror movie, all windows and hallways and locked doors, Mish insisted Candace install a few more cameras to cover all the blind spots around the property and slept with a hatchet under her pillow. 

All this to say, the whale does not come as a surprise.  

She looked up Candace online after they met, seeing photos of she and her ex-husband at charity events or galas. He was some East Coast Old Money Monopoly Man, but Candace seemed to drop out of the sky and into the world fully formed, no childhood or history.

Even now, the limbs and branches of Candace’s life feel like a mystery. Mish still, after all this time, searches for loose breadcrumbs of a person Candace might have been, any kind of an answer to lead her back to who she was before Mish, before Paul. At first, the unanswered questions were exciting pieces of Candace’s story. Mish would run her hands all over Candace’s face, count her fingers and eyelashes, try to summon the feeling of someone real, try to bring her down to Earth.

The first few weeks together felt like laying backwards into warm water. It felt like what meditation is supposed to feel like. Lasting, unquestioned, empty-minded peace. Ecstasy. Mish, prone to both introspection and insecurity, for whom just existing never seemed enough, needed something bigger to follow and be fulfilled by. Something religious in its bigness.  

The weekend after Santa Fe, Mish gradually began moving her things into Candace’s old home in Denver. Suddenly Candace seemed to stop taking gigs for a bit, seemed to want to spend all her time crawling all over Mish – making her juices, cutting up ginger for her stomach. She introduced Mish to her friends, gave her the down payment for a Camry. It was a funny thing, feeling worshiped. Mish suspected she was never going to be able to survive there, once it plateaued as love is prone to do.

All this to say, Mish is relieved to see another creature who does not belong, who is placed into captivity, who was bred to eventually outgrow this world.  

*

Candace is sticking her head out the bars on the windows, smoking a lost cigarette found in a drawer, when she hears the doorbell ring. A fight the other night about how isolating the summer has been ended in Candace accidentally inviting the neighbors over for dinner. Stephanie, an Ayurvedic dermatologist, and her husband Mack, a lawyer. Old friends of she and Paul’s. 

She doesn’t particularly like either of them but they’re part of it up here, the ritual of status. Mish sees her life with Paul, this home in the mountains, as sickening altar to wealth.  

She’s not not wrong, but gone are the days of Candace wishing Mish’s youth could bear the burden of nuance. She wishes Mish’s outrage had space for realizing how necessary it can feel, in lost years, to shrug off layers of yourself and find some kind of god. She knows how ridiculous it can sound, to argue for god when you own the church, but meaning is a sparse commodity. 

It’s a little after 7 when door opens and Candace stubs out the cigarette. She hears Mish’s voice jump two or three notches up to greet them, hears the booze-touched wavering of her anxious energy. 

Finally walking downstairs, she sees Mish pouring two glasses in the living room from the bottle Mack brought. Stephanie has cut her hair short and ditched the makeup, Mack is graying and stopped wearing ties. 

“Hi, you two,” Candace greets them with hugs, cheek kisses.

“Look at you!” Stephanie does the arm squeeze. “You are so. Skinny. And your girlfriend is so beautiful.” 

Everyone in the room knows she just means young. 

“You look great, Mack,” Candace says.

“I was telling him I like his watch,” Mish chimes in. She puts an arm around Candace’s waist. “It’s Cartier.” 

Mish is wearing layers of gold bracelets on her thin wrists, giant gold hoops in her ears, a lacey slip dress like she’s auditioning for Atonement. Candace notices she’s washed her hair. 

“She has great taste,” Mack says.

“That smells amazing,” Stephanie moves on, walking into the kitchen. “Do you need help, Misha?” 

Mish walks with her, flirting, turning on the kind of eye contact she and Candace haven’t shared in weeks. Candace walks over to the windows with Paul, staring out at the forest, the sunset. The tops of the trees blur over on themselves in a sea of textured, burning endlessness.

“So how’s work?” Mack asks. 

“Busier than I thought I’d be when we came up here.” 

“You still have a studio here?”  

“I do. It’s smaller than at home, but it works. How’s your office?”

“I actually took a sabbatical this quarter. Handed off all of my active cases, trying to spend some more time at home.” 

“How’s that feel?” 

“Honestly? I was miserable for a week, but then loved it. I don’t think the Golf Channel has been off once the entire time. But fuck, it was so liberating. I’m tempted not to go back.”

“So don’t.” 

“Might not. We’ve been talking about Steph selling her practice, buying a place out East to be closer to the kids at UVA.”

This conversation about nothingness makes Candace miss fighting with Mish. Premature nostalgia, she tells herself, the fear of knowing you will be sad later – the sadness of knowing you’ll be sad. She realizes this is why they are together – they have made their own shared toxicity a religion. On their shared, futile searches for god, they strapped themselves to each other. 

And right on cue, Mish retches and throws up a red-wine-peanut-butter mess of vomit all over the pan of snapper with a vegan butter and caper sauce.

*

Mish wakes up by the lake and her face is covered in snow. Her instinct is to scream for help, but her voice feels frozen in time. Her mouth still tastes like acid, her esophagus throbbing like there’s a pill the size of an apple core stuck in her throat.

She rolls over and finds herself in a tent with the door unzipped, open to the shore that’s dusted with soft white powder, holding back a perfectly iced-over surface of water. 

She doesn’t remember setting up a tent last night, she can’t fathom how there’s snow in July, she doesn’t know whose wool socks are on her feet. But the feeling of creeping hypothermia if she sits still overthrows any lingering questions and she races out of the tent, running up to the water’s edge and sticking a foot out, testing the surface. Solid. 

She steps onto the ice – one foot, then two.

The snow crunches into the socks, soaking them through. She walks lightly across, steady like a baby calf, then at a careful trot. In an instant and an eternity, she finds herself at the middle.

She bends down, wiping away the snow from a patch, and waits. 

Like they’re stuck together in a snow globe, one that halts time and stops moments in its rotation, the whale emerges, touching its face to the exposed patch of clear ice. 

“Hi,” Mish says. She doesn’t need a response. 

As quickly as it came, it’s gone again. Mish stands, her feet numb, the hairs in her nose freezing over. She races back to the house.

*

“This girl throws up on everything,” Candace told her best friend Gail, Paul’s sister, a few weeks after Santa Fe, and after Mish had thrown up in a library garden, a bathroom sink at an art gallery in Aspen, and a koi pond at a ramen restaurant downtown.

“She – wait, she does what?” Gail asked.

It was a weird thing to say, Candace knew, but that’s exactly what it was. Most of the time, back then, Mish wasn’t even drunk. Occasionally Candace would see her taking a pill, or drinking pickle juice because she read on Twitter it re-balanced the pH of her gut flora. But, and usually while they were out of the house, a glaze would overtake Mish’s face, her eyes would fog, and in an instant, she’d be throwing up that morning’s breakfast or yesterday’s dinner. 

“Do you think she’s pregnant?” Gail suggested.

“Yeah, sure,” Candace half-snorted. 

When she suggested the idea to Mish, Mish did not rule it out. Months later, Mish would bring up that mistake as one of many brutally obvious signals that Candace did not take Mish seriously, that Candace thought of sexuality as a whimsical phase to pass through on the way to a larger hedonistic pursuit of freedom. Mish was not wrong on either front. 

Candace kind of loved the throwing up, though, back then. Not how awful it made Mish feel, not the hours of pumping her full of electrolytes afterwards, but how easily Mish could expel unwanted things from her life. Mothers. Ex-girlfriends. University teachers. Her body was a tightly sealed fortress, safely kept. 

There was, obviously, concern about why. Eventually it narrowed down to some combination of ulcers and hormones, and when instructed to stop drinking for a few months to “let her body settle,” Mish took that as a call to action to drink in the mornings and nights with a vengeful aggression.

It was hard, the line to tow, wanting Mish to come home but fearing she might come home drunk, the impatience of fighting a delirious, angry cartoon character for yet another night in a row. The thrown plates and vases. 

“Is there someone that can help her? Someone who isn’t you?” Gail asked at the time.

“Yes and no,” Candace lied. There were plenty of people, but she wanted to see it through – 

“To the end?” Gail finished.

“It wouldn’t feel right. She doesn’t make friends easily.” 

“Go figure.” 

Then the nightmares started, symptoms of a similar kind of bodily expulsion, but one that left Mish feeling more haunted and less relieved – and Candace knew she’d be there for a while. 

*

“Hey–” Mish races into the house, taking off her icy clothes in the foyer, running naked into the living room. She turns on the fireplace and sits at the hearth, wrapping herself in a Pottery Barn quilt.

“What are you doing?” Candace appears at the top of the stairs and rushes down. “It’s eighty degrees.”

“I swear to fucking God,” Mish says, teeth chattering. “There’s a whale.” 

“Were you asleep?”

“By the lake.” 

“What lake?”

“At the end of the drive.” 

Mish hears herself; she hears the way her words tip around Candace’s disbelief.

“I don’t know that there’s a lake.” Candace turns on the air conditioning. She watches Mish warm up her blue lips, her inexplicably purple toes. “Should I check the monitor?” 

Mish feels a sadness creeping, a realization that the worlds between them have expanded into a universe, that they are both holding on to two ends of a splitting rope. A hatred growing, she knows Candace wants to ask if she’s drunk. 

She stares at Candace’s face, her heavy eyelids and gray eyes, and doesn’t recognize the shape of her cheeks. A million photos of Candace in her phone, the outlines of Candace’s lips and collar bones sealed into fingertips, and her stomach lurches to see a stranger in the kitchen. 

Did I choose to misremember? Did I memorize a version of you that never existed? Am I already letting you go? 

“Maybe there’s not,” Mish says. “I’m sorry I ruined dinner.” 

*

At dinner in Santa Fe, Candace wore a white button down and Mish came in a leather skirt. Despite the six hour drive earlier, it was across the table when something began, finally, to sing. In the first twenty minutes Candace learned Mish spoke Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean; she learned she’d wanted to be Jewish as a child and hosted a Passover seder for her stuffed animals; she learned Mish had a DUI from high school and was thinking of dropping out of graduate school. 

They finished the bottle of wine, barely touched the food, and outside in the parking lot Candace smoked a cigarette and watched Mish yell at a man who hadn’t stepped out of her way on the sidewalk. 

The next day they went to Meow Wolf and for a moment in the bathroom, Candace found herself looking up Zillow listings for homes in town, places with a garage that Mish could turn into an art studio and yoga space. Candace knew there were habits she was meant to break, going from 0 to 200, diving in headfirst – habits that since the divorce she’d been working through. 

But later that night, at their second dinner, she told Mish she loved her. She opened a floodgate of impulse and felt the stinging of premature nostalgia when she realized, almost seconds after, the relationship would eventually end not for a lack of love, but from a need to break a sick cycle she’d just begun again. 

Once, Mish called her a “groomer.” Mish mocked her age, her career, her performance of a sexuality Candace was never quite sure of. Every day since, Mish punished Candace for starting a relationship she never planned to see through to the end, but not nearly as much as Candace punished herself. 

*

It’s around midnight when Mish stands at the bedroom window, trying to squeeze her giant head through the bars. She thinks it’s strange, the way sometimes you can just decide to love someone or not. Her mom stopped loving her dad, or whatever version of her dad still exists. Candace asked her first, and Mish said yes, but every day since, it’s like Candace has tried to punish her for saying yes.  

She sticks out her tongue and catches a raindrop. There’s a chance they can stay friends. A barely-there chance. 

She goes back downstairs and grabs some blankets from the closet. The lamps of the pathway light up as usual when she starts down the walkway. It’s pouring out. Streaks of lightning shoot through the black sky. The blankets are soaked by the time she gets there.

In the tent, she sits and watches the rain fall violently outside, beating against the lake like rubber bullets, coating the entire world in a dreary, vertical grayness. 

Suddenly Candace arrives, carrying a thermos, and joins her. They sit side by side, Candace’s eyes unblinking, her face unflinching, as the lake in its realness sinks in. She relents. 

“We shouldn’t be this close to water with the lightning,” Candace says.

Mish wraps the sleeping bag around her head like a bonnet.

“When did you forget about me?” she asks. 

Candace holds her breath and lets the pounding rain drown out her heartbeat. “What do you mean?” 

Mish doesn’t answer. She’s sick of Candace playing dumb so she just sits, silently, watching the sky feed the lake and the lake feed the whale and the electric whale dance below the surface, refusing to reveal itself so long as Candace is holding her breath. 

They wake up hours later, dry and warm, the storm over. 

Mish pokes her head out of the tent first and notices it almost immediately. 

No lake. 

She turns to look behind her, at Candace who is asleep on her stomach, and feels sorry for her. She wants her, so badly, to see it. She doesn’t know if she ever will. And Mish, above all else, is tired – tired of sharing this place with someone who would prefer it not to exist.  

*

The Airbnb Candace reserved for them was big, bigger than anything Mish could have gotten on her own. Mish drank an extra glass of wine to settle her nerves, her sweaty palms. 

The whole night, Candace seemed especially curious about Mish’s mother, aggressively curious, asking questions about her mother’s childhood and her mother’s temper, and Mish loved being examined. She loved being a specimen, a tiny deity there to entertain.

But she wasn’t sure what to make of this woman, or of her concentrated attention, or why she’d decided to love her so early and so fast. On the drive back, Mish looked over at Candace, decided she felt safe enough to give it a shot, and she said the words back, not knowing then all they would eventually mean in their passage. 

*

Candace stands on the shoreline. 

She watches Mish in the middle of the lake, balancing on a floating piece of driftwood, barefoot and in her slip dress, a bit of vomit crusted to the bottom hem. 

Mish turns back and looks at the house, then at Candace. Mistaking the look for someone asking permission, Candace waves, but by the time she lifts her arm, Mish has already turned away. 

In a second she is there and in another she is gone, sinking into the water, diving.

By Tayler Bunge

From: United States

Website: https://www.taylerbunge.com/

Instagram: taylerhanxi

Twitter: fatwolverines